before us, the great nave clears suddenly of all that clamorous life of the city which did not fear before to pass in and out on its daily affairs and to bring its worldly traffickings, its quarrels, troubles, excitements, sorrows, into the House of God,—and we lose sight for ever of the mediæval world. The roof of the Duomo is ascended from the south transept. It is a long climb, but well worth the pains. You emerge at the top into sunshine and air, and find yourself on the terrace of a vast garden, all of sparkling candid stone, where you may wander, easily losing yourself, along paths and alleys, up and down flights of steps, always between marble groves of flowers and foliage, with a forest of slender stems springing up around you, and flowering into human forms high up against the blue—all the petrified growth of that lake grotto of Gandoglia, or _Candoglia_, as the punning old writers call it. There is no open space in the heart of Milan where you can take the air so pleasantly on fine days in winter and spring as up here. But this garden is suspended in the air, and you look down upon the thick clustered roofs which cover all the ground below in an immense roundure, like the low ruddy vegetation of an island left bare at low tide in the middle of a purple sea. Immediately beneath, at dizzy depths, are the narrow intersecting lines of the streets, full of black, crawling humanity. From up here you see the city as a whole, and are able to realise something of its geographic place. If the day is clear there will appear, rising up on north and west beyond the sea of plain, the dim shores of what looks like another world—a vast half-moon of hovering forms, cloud-like, yet with the clear-cut contours of earthly substances, rising out of the shadow of earth to shining whiteness against the sky. The guidebooks give names to these fairy shapes—Mont Blanc to the west, Monta Rosa nearer and more conspicuous, the Matterhorn rising close behind this last, and other famous heights. Unless the weather is exceptionally favourable, however, one cannot discern with clearness more than the nearer spurs of the mighty Alpine barrier which defends the pleasant land of Italy from the cold and gloomy North. But it is enough to make one understand the significance of Milan in the historic past, as guardian of the chief gateways of Italy. [Illustration: PUTTI, GUGLIA DI AMADEO.]